I sincerely apologize for us letting everyone down with respect to thesite's condition. A myriad factors have led to this point, primarilylack of time and ever-increasing concern with respect to the legalliability of running a site that allows third parties to post whateverthey want. This "whatever they want" isn't limited to just stories,incidentally; the ability to post one's own web site essentially opensup endless possibilities that we do not have the time to monitor andmanage. We have discussed transitioning the site to a model like otherweb sites use, where only text can be posted, but we have no time toenact such a change. Additionally, relevant laws seem to be constantlychanging these days, and generally they're making it worse for websiteoperators (increased liability for the actions of their users).

We enjoyed making the site available to the masses and are incrediblygrateful to the uncountable contributors (both financially and theauthors who posted their stories) over the years. For now we have noplans to shut the site down; we have a contract with our ISP for severalmore years, I believe, so if nothing else it would be a waste of moneyto shut it down without getting our donors' money's worth.

Of all the failures this past year, I apologize to all of you the mostfor letting ASSM go unmoderated this past year. I know this was ourresponsibility, and we have completely and inexcusably failed. When ourprimary server crashed last summer, I always thought the proposal by ourtech admin to rewrite almost all of the site's software was preposterousgiven that we each have at most a few minutes per month to attend to thesite these days, but he was adamant that we take the site into the 21stcentury due to security and other technological concerns. This wouldhave made plenty of sense had we had the time to pull off the[monumental] job [which we spent many years doing the first time], butit is now obvious to me (and likely all of you) that this goal wascompletely unrealistic.

With respect to all of the people who have volunteered to help out, Iappreciate it. Perhaps I am overly paranoid, but it is difficult totrust a complete stranger by giving shell access to servers for which weare responsible. I also have no time to try to manage a group ofvolunteers, however enthusiastic. These two issues combined (lack oftrust and inability to oversee/manage due to lack of time) mean it isall but impossible for us to accept outside help, as essential as it may be.

I am happy to see someone else (VeryWellAged) attempting to take themantle and run with it; I wish him/her/them all the very best.

I will endeavor to read and reply to any replies to this message, but asusual I cannot guarantee a timely response.

tiemeupalso wrote:it would be nice to have a link to those sites.i have never heard of either one.

Seriously? There is this useful website called Google...

anyway, if you didn't know about it, the asstr front page is down so it is of no use to you. If you did know about it, the actual pages are still up, so you can use the aforementioned Google site to find the stories you are looking for.

tiemeupalso wrote:it would be nice to have a link to those sites.i have never heard of either one.

Seriously? There is this useful website called Google...

anyway, if you didn't know about it, the asstr front page is down so it is of no use to you. If you did know about it, the actual pages are still up, so you can use the aforementioned Google site to find the stories you are looking for.

Funnily enough, I did try Google, but searc hing for either of these "ASSM and ASSTR" nothing relevant came up.